Administrator Activities

The SAP HANA Cloud administrator is responsible for starting and stopping the SAP HANA Cloud database instances.

SAP HANA Cloud Central is the tool to achieve this.

There are many reasons for stopping and restarting the database. These include:

• Adding a data lake
• Scale-up the database to add more RAM
• Maintenance of the application that is running on the database.
• Take database offline to prevent unwanted updates
• Cloud provider support team suggests a restart after troubleshooting

Database instances setup under a trial BTP account will automatically stop after a period of inactivity. You will need to restart them if you wish to use them again.

Watch this video to learn about how to upgrade the SAP HANA Cloud database.

One of the key benefits of using a cloud solution is that new features are available much sooner than with on-premise solutions. Whereas a new release of an on-premise solution usually take place yearly or even bi-yearly, cloud solution updates take place more frequently, usually every few weeks.

For SAP HANA Cloud, currently, a new version is released every 3 months. This is known as the quarterly release cycle (QRC). The release code format is QRC QQ/YYYY.

Customers can choose to upgrade once the new release is available, or they can delay the upgrade for a maximum of 7 months. After 7 months if a customer did not choose to upgrade then the upgrade is performed automatically. The automatic upgrade moves the customer to the next release after the one they were using, and not to the very latest release available.

SAP continually provide patches that address security and other high priority aspects of SAP HANA Cloud and these do not wait until the next QRC release.

The upgrade of SAP HANA Cloud highlights one of the biggest differences between SAP HANA Cloud and SAP HANA on- premise. Whereas the upgrade of SAP HANA Cloud on-premise requires a significant investment in resources and time, and includes many tasks, an SAP HANA Cloud upgrade is automated, very simple and is started from a single menu option controlled by the customer. All aspects of the upgrade are taken care of by the cloud provider.

Watch this video to learn about monitoring the SAP HANA Cloud Database.

Security administration is a specialist area within general administration and is usually managed by security experts who need to consider the entire IT landscape and not just the SAP HANA Cloud database. They must ensure compliance across all solutions.

There are many tasks that are handled by the security administrator in an SAP HANA Cloud environment. These include:

Monitoring critical security settings - SAP provide recommendations for security settings such as password lifetime of users, how system privileges should be distributed, setting the database activity trace level. The security administrator should review and check these.

• Data encryption - SAP HANA Cloud database uses a number of encryption services to protect data and logs. Although SAP takes care of encryption, the security administrator should check the status of encryption using the SAP HANA Cockpit
• Auditing activities - monitor and record selected actions performed in the SAP HANA database, providing visibility on who did what in the database (or tried to do what) and when. Examples include, changes to user authorization, creation or deletion of database objects, authentication of users, changes to system configuration, access to or changes to sensitive information.

• Manage certificates and keys required for trust validation -SAP HANA Cloud supports multiple authentication methods and these often use keys and certificates.

• Monitor data anonymization -SAP HANA Cloud database provides anonymization services to ensure the privacy of data. This is implemented by creating SQL views that include a anonymization settings. The security administrator runs reports that identify which views are anonymized (and which ones are not) and various KPIs that provide insight into how data is being secured.

The administrator is responsible for managing users. Users is a generic term and can refer to developers or application users. Administration tasks typically include:

• Creating users, user groups and assigning roles and privileges
• Investigating authorization or authentication issues
• Deactivating users

Watch this video to learn about managing users, roles and permissions.

The setup sequence is usually as follows:

1. Create privileges (many standard privileges are supplied by SAP)
2. Create roles
3. Assign privileges to roles
4. Create users
5. Create user groups
6. Assign users to user groups
7. Assign users to roles

Note

In the SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA database, there is no single "user administrator" user, that is a user with the system privilege USER ADMIN. This is because the user SYSTEM in SAP HANA database instances is reserved for use by SAP. The default administration user in SAP HANA database instances is DBADMIN. As the administrator of the default user group, DBADMIN can be used to set up other administration users and delegate administration tasks.